Branding in the Age of AI and Zero-Click SERPs | Rand Fishkin

[00:03] Hi, I am Gianluca Fiorelli, and today we have at The Search Session, a person that

[00:09] I consider a really good friend because in our industry we know many people we get

[00:14] to know and get intimate sometimes with person, but really friends, just very few.

[00:20] And I think that this person is a really good friend, more than just a colleague.

Everybody knows him.

[00:29] Let's try to guess who he's, I mean, in the early days it was known

as the man with the yellow shoes.

[00:39] He was the founder of a, a very famous first blog then consultancy.

Then as a software as a service company.

[00:49] He wrote a book, he live in Seattle, maybe for things.

His wife is more famous than him,

and this person is Rand Fishkin.

Hey Rand, how are you doing?

Ciao, Buongiorno, Buonasera

i'm good.

I'm good.

[01:12] Yeah, I you for having me, Gianluca . This is my favorite.

This is my favorite introduction.

[01:16] Usually people say, oh, he accomplished all these things, did all this stuff.

[01:19] I like someone who says, this is my friend.

[01:23] Well, I, I, I, I think I am lucky enough to, to be able to,

[01:27] to do this kind of introduction because actually we are friends.

I

Yeah.

Yeah.

[01:31] just, just as, as an actor for our listeners and watchers a part

of it, we get to know virtually.

[01:38] Many, many years ago, because I was substantially spamming

the comments of Moz at time,

people think people think

I think I'm still in the,

with comments, but you can.

[01:49] I don't, I don't think that Mos still do, still doing the gamification

that was invented back in the days.

[01:57] But if they stop it, I was still, even if I wasn't commenting for

years, I was still in at the top.

[02:09] Obviously you were the super top and, and then we know in this, I think it was the

second edition of Search Love in London

Hmm.

[02:21] casually, because we were both dining in a Greek restaurant

in front of a conference place.

Incredible.

you say, Hey, you are Gianluca.

Okay.

[02:31] So I practically had two dinners because one.

[02:35] By myself and then invited again by all the team, all the speakers, and yeah.

Yes, I'm it.

So yes.

Why?

[02:45] I mean, if I know a person, why be obliged to be so formal?

Let's

I think, I think this is wonderful.

You know what I appreciate about it.

[02:55] It puts primacy of the most important thing first, which in

[02:59] my opinion is not professional accomplishments or, you know, knowledge.

It's it's relationships.

[03:07] That's, to me, that's what matters the most.

[03:09] And I don't know, you know, ever since my, my experiences, you

[03:14] know, post Moz relationships first business great, but it's secondary.

I think it's also because it's.

Making a little bit more general.

It's because I'm Italian.

I live in Spain, I'm a Mediterranean.

[03:28] It's in our nature to be so, to be yeah, open socially.

[03:34] Even if you are an introverted, you are maybe more extroverted

than introverted American.

Yeah, it's, it's cultural.

It's cultural.

[03:42] I mean, I think that this is something Americans can definitely learn from

[03:47] from their Mediterranean cousins, which is, it's a good, and, and, you know,

south and Latin America too, my God.

I mean, very, very social places.

[03:56] But hopefully, hopefully someday the US learns.

Let's see.

But okay, so let's move.

[04:04] I mean, I would continue with this kind of conversation, but maybe we are going

to retake it at the end of the episode.

Now.

Let's go for.

[04:14] Taking respect of the time of our watchers, I usually ask to all my

[04:20] guests this question, but I was, because formally, and I mean you are even joke

[04:27] about this because you are always and top SEO and you are, and you see Rand Fishkin

and you say, I don't do SEO anymore.

No,

No, it's true.

[04:40] But, and I, so I wa because my, usually my question is how

SEO os treating you lately.

[04:47] I, I will say, Hey, this is not a question for Rand.

[04:51] So I was thinking, how do you see SEO from, from the perspective

of not being an SEO anymore

Hmm.

Yeah.

Interesting.

You know, for.

[05:04] I think for the first few years after I left Moz and left, left SEO,

[05:08] which for folks who don't know or might not know, so my first company,

Moz, was in SEO software space.

[05:14] And when I left I had a non-compete agreement, right?

[05:17] So basically I had to sign a contract, which in some parts of the United States

are illegal, but, but not where I live.

[05:23] Sign a contract saying that I, I wouldn't do anything to do with SEO.

[05:28] For, I, I wanna say, I think it was two years, and then Moz was sold, you know,

[05:34] the company was sold and they made me sign another one in order to do the deal.

[05:38] So then it became, I wanna say five years in total.

[05:42] Uh, and so basically I only, if I wanted to do SEO I could only start

doing it this year or last year.

[05:49] And, And I, I just haven't, I haven't practiced, I haven't kept up, but from

[05:52] an external perspective, the, the, Perception that I have is that it's

[05:58] very, it's a very strange place where there's a perception that the field is

shrinking or in trouble or problematic.

[06:08] But when you look at the statistics of, you know, how many people are employed

[06:11] in SEO, how many people are doing SEO, how many people are learning SEO,

[06:15] how many people are still searching for SEO types of things in Google?

[06:19] It's never really fallen, it's, it's only grown.

[06:22] I think SEO has become a core part of digital marketing.

[06:27] You know, in a way that Gianluca, when you and I were coming up in the field,

[06:31] we were trying to get respect, you know, we were trying to get budget,

[06:35] we were trying to get companies and corporations to pay any attention to

SEO, and now everybody has an SEO team.

Everybody has SEO practices.

Everybody invests in it.

[06:46] So it's this huge mature industry with, you know, billion dollar

[06:50] players in, in, in people like SEMrush and Ahrefs, and, you know, other

tools, um, public companies too.

[06:58] And so I, I think it's a still an interesting place to be.

Yes, totally.

[07:04] I think that the classic SEOs is that thing is more is more a PR

things because it sells quite a lot.

I don't know.

[07:14] Now with AI overview, how many are going to have this kind of articles.

But I think it's bad.

[07:21] And, and I think that just as perception I have the big majority

[07:26] of the SEO communities always felt itself as the nerd, the nerd guy.

And so the one.

[07:35] Not saying like, Mulder in, in X-Files working in the down, in level.

Level, yes.

And, but somehow similar.

[07:45] And it was the cool guys were the social media and people

and the obscure ones, the SEOs.

So, but so is a, some sort of grief.

[07:58] For this path that maybe they had and also some sort of

unconscious sense of inferiority.

[08:06] So whenever they feel that something is going to shake the certainty they

have, they go down in a big depression.

They are essentially yes.

Yeah,

[08:20] a sort of psychological issue more than something real because sincerely, now

[08:27] that everybody say a AI is going to kill SEO, I never received so many pitch.

[08:33] I think you're absolutely right that there is a, an inferiority complex

in the, in the psyche of most SEOs.

[08:41] And I, my suspicion is that's because of, you know, for the first 10 or 15 years

[08:45] that the practice existed, Google actively suggested that SEO was unnecessary.

SEO is spam.

You don't need an SEO.

Just make good content.

[08:56] Developers and publishers and, and all these other folks in

the field were naysayers, right?

They didn't believe in SEO.

They, they didn't wanna prioritize it.

The software engineering world hated.

[09:08] SEO thought everyone who did that was spam.

[09:11] So I think there was just so much of the field's history.

And this is recent history, right?

[09:16] We're talking up until maybe 20 12, 13, 14 that.

[09:21] There was just no respect given and fighting for every scrap.

[09:25] So, sure, you know, it is 10 years later, but I don't, I don't think

[09:29] that that psychological impact is gonna go away anytime soon.

[09:34] Versus something like the advertising field or social media marketing,

[09:38] influencer marketing creator marketing, email marketing, right?

[09:41] These are all fields where you didn't have that same fight for budget.

[09:45] You didn't have that same fight for respect

No.

[09:48] Also, I think because of all, because I think that all the let's say

[09:55] marketing channels, let's convince, so related to digital, they are

all technical marketing, but SEO.

[10:03] It's probably the most technical of the marketing.

[10:07] So there is always the, and being in the community, this sort of

pendulum between everything.

[10:13] SEO is 99% technical and 1% content, and then content is

king and technical and black.

Something like

well, I am.

but.

[10:25] I am, I am relatively excited for the, the AI era, whether that's

[10:31] actually people using AI tools, which I think is, is still relatively small,

or whether it's Google using ai.

[10:37] I'm excited for that to make a big change in what people are working on

[10:45] and worried about, and my suspicion is there's gonna be technical portions of

[10:48] SEO that still matter, but there's gonna be a lot more opportunity for creative.

[10:53] That's because, and, and content, because most of how AI works is

not links and keywords and um,

No, I think that, yes, I agree with you.

[11:05] I think that the most interesting part of AI is that this is somehow can introduce

a new topic in our conversation is.

[11:15] Even if there is some, this sort of popping up of new tools for tracking

[11:20] prompts that I don't know how much useful it is to track prompt whenever.

[11:24] 'Cause if Kios can be in the trillions, prompts can be in the

[11:29] gazillions because apart that one prompt can receive 10 different

answer because of personalization.

So.

Did you see Ross Hudgens LinkedIn post

Yes, yes, I was.

Yeah.

Yes, I was.

[11:46] But it, I was agreeing with your, your comment because that's why I then

[11:51] eventually will to talk about that, another type of analysis that I do.

[11:56] But because we don't have the data, but some sense I think that the

[12:04] best in our industry are coming back to the marketing route.

[12:09] So audience analysis, what really we should create content about?

What is the product about?

[12:19] So let's say if we are a software as a service doing branding

[12:24] enablement, not, let's go talking about, I don't know, cooking.

So going so, so, so, so wide.

[12:32] And I think that this is one good effect of AI because it's obliging people to

[12:38] be creative and not so with a definition that I always dislike so data driven.

[12:45] I always prefer that informed 'cause data driven is somehow like a robot because

[12:50] I can say the statistic is saying that if I go to this way, I go faster, but

Why faster because maybe it's a cliff.

[12:57] So I go faster to, to a direction where, where I have to go, which is

[13:02] something that happened to me in, in the Canarias because I forgot

to, to switch the Google maps.

[13:09] You know that Google Maps is telling you, you by default, the fastest route,

All

[13:14] but in the  Canarias , the fastest route is taking streets that

are like this instead of doing.

The classic longer curve.

[13:23] So I was, oh, so that is being data driven and the other one is being data informed.

[13:30] So I think that this is not having data to be driven by.

[13:35] You have to just pick up the data you have and return to pick up the real data that

you really need and not just be guided by.

[13:44] I don't know what is a Google Analytics telling to you or what.

[13:49] 10 million keywords clustered are telling to you because they are

[13:53] telling to you what people are already seeing you for, but not for what

they are not seeing you and so on.

[14:00] So I think this is maybe the not so talk best advantage of it.

[14:07] AI in search era, then obviously there are many, many things that also can go

[14:13] wrong as you can start to see spamming as it was 2005 because it's substantially

like this in we are living somehow.

[14:22] But a situation like 20 years ago when SEO was still relatively young and because we

have transparent, because we don't have.

That much knowledge.

[14:32] So experimenting, you do also the blanket thing possible.

[14:37] So I was coming to you for our public you are also the CEO of, Snack Bar, studio.

[14:45] which is a company, a small, independent company where you are

[14:49] going, producing, and you are in the meta testing of a video game.

[14:53] So let's use the metaphor of a video game, and let's use as our character,

[14:59] Google OpenAI and the people in the middle, which are us, the marketers,

[15:06] If you would need to to create a story, Google and OpenAI and the marketers,

what kind of characters would it be?

[15:14] Google would be the classic big boss, or OpenAI, the hero.

I don't know.

[15:20] I don't think it's going to be hero or hero should be the people in the middle.

What do you envision this kind of.

[15:28] yeah, if I, if I had to craft an analogy there, I think the, the, the

hero are the, uh, the users, right?

[15:35] That's, that's what everyone is making everything else for.

[15:38] And so marketers are sort of, One piece of the puzzle, and then these other platforms

are, are sort of the challenges, right?

So marketers are almost a tool.

[15:48] and the, the people who create things, the people who invent things,

[15:53] the people who make products and services and content, that's the

hero in, in my view, that's the hero.

And then marketers are just a tool, right?

[16:02] We're, we're someone who helps people get their.

[16:06] Product in the places where their audience can pay attention.

And Google and OpenAI to a small degree.

[16:14] Reddit, Pinterest, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube TikTok, Bing, Yahoo.

All of those are gatekeepers, right?

[16:24] So they, you know, they're sort of the, the little mini bosses to defeat

so that you can reach your audience.

Yeah, it's cool.

Maybe someone should take the classic.

[16:35] Hero journey and invent a video game with this sort of draft

[16:40] I don't, I don't know how well it would sell, and you'd probably

have a lot of copyright issues.

Yes, probably.

[16:46] But I mean, as I was saying before, especially SEO are very, geek, so

[16:52] probably as a community will buy it, so it would be very niche.

It is.

It is a big, big industry.

Mm. And I have a question for you.

[17:02] You say that, okay, I'm not an SEO anymore, but sincerely, don't you

[17:07] think that Spark Toro, for instance, is a wonderful tool also for SEO?

[17:14] Well, I think Spark Toro is a wonderful tool for marketers.

[17:19] And some SEOs, at least the the SEOs who practice, um, content distribution

[17:26] especially, and influencing place people in places outside of traditional

search engines and AI tools.

[17:34] Yes, I think that Spark Toro is excellent for that.

[17:37] But at the, at the core of SEO is sort of what are people searching

for or, or prompting AI tools for.

[17:45] What what is being returned and how do I get more visible

or higher up in those results?

[17:53] And Spark Toro doesn't directly help with those things, right?

[17:56] Spark Toro is about audience research fundamentally.

[17:58] So it's saying, Hey, this group of people, what YouTube channels they subscribe

to, what subreddits are they following?

What.

Websites do they visit?

[18:08] Are they using Google to search more or Chat GPT to search more or, or perplexity.

[18:15] And those questions, I think come before you do SEO rather

than in the middle or after.

[18:22] That's not to say some people don't use us for their content distribution

[18:25] and their pr and those tactics might be part of what they do for SEO.

[18:31] We are not, we're not intentionally doing it.

[18:33] As I mentioned before, Gianluca, I had to be very careful to make sure that Spark

[18:36] Toro is not an SEO tool, because otherwise I would be in violation of my contract.

Obviously, obviously.

But anyway.

[18:43] Even if Spark Toro is not a tool meant for SEO.

[18:47] Because it, it is not it's tool for marketing in general.

[18:52] It's, it's a tool for discovery, for audience analysis especially.

[18:55] But audience analysis is important for social media, for email marketing, for

all the marketers, for the CMO above them.

[19:05] And for an SEO, it's important when you have to design a strategy.

[19:09] Now, for instance, we know that, we need to, to, to understand the

[19:14] audience before in order to also better research, inform our research

about what do we search, what we do.

[19:23] So the best way, for instance, in my case, when I use Sparktoro for

[19:28] this kind of works is say, okay, this is the type of audiences that

my client is trying to target.

Mm-hmm.

[19:37] So let's say what Reddit, because, so I, you Sparktoro is making my work easier

[19:43] instead of using a tool and scraping all the potential Reddit, sub Reddit.

[19:49] But maybe yes or not related to My targeted audiences, I can start

[19:56] from the ones that are recommended by Sparktoro if I want to.

[20:02] Because SEO is not just positioning the text, it's also It's multimodal

Chat GPT, it is multimodal.

AI model is becoming multimodal.

The SERPs multimodal and so on.

So.

[20:16] If I'm not having a YouTube channel, my client doesn't have the force to

[20:23] create a YouTube channel, who are the YouTubers that I can contact and create

[20:27] co-marketing relation with maybe on their channel or bringing them on my site.

[20:35] So this is the kind of work that I, I think that the kind of use.

SEO can have of Sparktoro.

Yeah.

[20:44] I think it's an excellent tool in this sense in for audience marketing, for

[20:48] audience analysis, which is a definition of what Amanda always stress about

[20:54] making the difference between audience analysis and market analysis, which

[20:59] they are not synonymous now let's say that one other big topic of yours,

[21:06] and I remember because I'm, honestly proud, but you wrote it about it.

[21:11] About this topic on your blog before, but I think the first time you

[21:16] talk about, this was about in the Inbounder 2018 in Madrid, and it was

the concept of zero click search and

there is zero click search.

[21:27] And I think that AI is increasing to the top this situation because.

[21:33] To be honest, I don't want to be the devil advocates for Google.

[21:37] Everybody's blaming Google because it's CTRish, but they never go seeing the CTR

of Chat GPT, Anthropic and all the LLMs.

[21:47] It's, it's really because it's, yes, it's super, super low.

So you with Amanda, you always talk okay.

Zero click.

[21:57] Search, and then you created the subsidiary concept

of zero click marketing.

[22:02] And so my question is now that the search results pages are becoming a space more

[22:09] for awareness, do you think that now the search results pages can be also a place

for doing strong zero click marketing?

[22:18] Yeah, that's absolutely, I mean, our contention is essentially that.

[22:21] Zero click marketing is what you can and should do everywhere.

[22:25] That's, that's search, it's social email, it's in your content,

it's in your video marketing.

[22:33] Uh, obviously all offline marketing, right?

[22:37] Billboards, radio, television, traditional advertising, all of that is zero click.

[22:42] And it's only in the digital era that Gianluca, that we had the.

[22:46] You know, this rise of the obsession of how do I drive clicks from platforms

[22:51] back to my site and then figure out what to do with people once they get there?

[22:57] And I, I would argue that generally traffic, unless, unless you're a publisher

[23:02] who monetizes through advertising, generally traffic is a vanity metric.

[23:06] What you really care about are sales, sales and conversions.

[23:09] And maximizing your traffic will not necessarily maximize

your sales and conversions.

What you.

[23:15] What you really want, especially now that every platform, social search

[23:19] content, no matter what, they are all reducing the clicks that are available.

[23:24] They are all prioritizing keeping people on their site

rather than sending them out.

[23:29] And as a result, you have to, if you're a responsible marketer, you have to invest

in zero click marketing and, and search.

You know, there's still clicks to be had.

[23:40] You know, I saw Cyrus Shepherd's piece about like, Hey, the click still matters.

You can still drive more traffic.

[23:46] You can, I'm not saying it's impossible, but you're fighting

an uphill battle, right?

You know that.

[23:52] You know that Google is shrinking the share of clicks that are available.

[23:56] You know that 10 years from now, there's gonna be way fewer clicks

available than there are today.

[24:03] And so you have to be thinking about how do I influence people in search

results that get no clicks at all.

[24:09] How do I influence them in the AI overviews or the instant answers or

[24:12] the, you know, whatever results Google is putting on that page, regardless

of whether you're gonna drive a click.

[24:18] I, I think this is the biggest shift that SEOs are undergoing.

AI is secondary to zero click.

I totally agree and I think that.

[24:31] Started to because of that zero click zero, that zero search.

SERP phenomenon.

[24:39] This is something that I was already thinking before.

[24:42] Even Chat GPT was, was a thing for instance,

[24:46] I mean, if you were paying attention, right?

[24:48] Like I, I think I wrote my first report on zero click search in 1616

or

yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

[24:54] 17. And you know, it's been a. It's just fallen.

[24:59] And so far, I wanna say I think it was 40% of clicks ended without a search.

[25:04] Now it's 60%, you know, it hasn't even been 10 years.

[25:07] And we've fall, you know, we've lost a, a fifth of all search clicks.

[25:11] And, and in fact, that's why I always said in my personal evolution as a, as

[25:17] an SEO in this case, in my more strategic facet of, of being an SEO in, serving also

[25:25] all these kind of features that Google is, was pushing and relating this, and

[25:30] I always really stressing about, okay, let's stop thinking to the classic search

[25:37] session where someone is searching and clicking immediately, but he's navigating.

[25:42] So if he's navigating, let's try to guess to, to, not to guess too.

[25:48] Individually the most statistical, probable, probable path this

person are going to, to do.

[25:56] And that's why I was using Google as a tool because Google with the same query,

[26:01] redefining that is pushing people to new queries, to new search results is telling

us where, what we should be visible, for.

And so I think that.

[26:12] With things that are so in the mouth of everybody right now, like query fan out,

[26:18] prompt analytics, all these things are just adding up to this substantially.

[26:24] This sort of strategy is, they are not something that

are so revolutionary for me.

[26:31] I think because before was using people also search for the people also ask.

[26:39] The query refinement of the topics, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

[26:43] Now, I also add the query fan out, but it's then more about all these massive

[26:49] information clustering in, in terms of entity search, in this case, in

order to very well structured website.

[26:59] So to target all these potential search journeys.

But now it's coming out.

What?

And, and I want to ask you this thing.

[27:08] Now it, it's personalization is coming very strong, let's say in Europe

[27:14] because, you know, your personalization can collide with privacy policy.

[27:19] But let's say in the rest of the world, personalization is going to be

very, very big, very big phenomenon.

So that's why analyzing prompts.

[27:29] It's somehow a Titanic job how can you perceive a possibility to work

[27:37] in a situation of personalization in search in social media?

[27:43] So I think that awareness, so doing zero click marketing for awareness.

And so for visibility is not enough.

You must do for memorability,

[27:56] Brand, it's, it's, look, I, technical marketers are gonna hate it.

[28:01] I, I don't think SEOs, I put myself in the same bucket.

I don't think we've ever been good at it.

[28:07] But brand marketing is, is gonna be where it's at.

[28:10] How do you build a brand that is memorable, resonant

emotionally triggering?

[28:17] A brand that sits and sticks in someone's head and that they associate with the

[28:22] problem that you solve and with your particular solution and brand, brand

[28:28] marketing is rarely achievable through the kinds of marketing that, you know,

a lot of digital marketers are used to.

[28:36] How do I, you know, move up in the Google search results or get more people

[28:39] to click on my blog or, you know, get an an email with a higher open rate.

Brand is different.

Brand is creating memorable campaigns.

It's standing out in people's minds.

[28:51] It is, you know, it's way more than logo and colors and, and branding.

[28:56] It is emotional triggers and it is, um, playing to someone's

[29:04] echoic memory and understanding of a space, perception of a field.

[29:12] That's uh, that's gonna be the, the, world.

[29:15] I mean, look, that's been the world that's won for the last 150 years.

[29:19] You know, there's, you can point to almost no brands, such a vanishingly,

[29:25] tiny number of brands that have built something truly huge and, and

[29:30] successful in their space, purely on, you know, click-based digital marketing,

whe whether that's PPC or SEO or.

Other kinds of digital ads.

[29:42] it's it's vanishingly small, so brand, brand is a solution.

Yes.

Totally right.

Totally right.

I totally agree.

[29:50] As someone who didn't, didn't do SEO since I

Right, right, right.

[29:57] I was working, yes, I work, I was working in television.

[30:01] For us, it was totally positioning our brand as a

different channel from the other.

[30:08] And if you think it also the most successful, internet based companies just

[30:13] think of Expedia, but I think of Trivago, especially in the travel industries.

[30:18] They became very successful when they started to do TV ads.

[30:24] Let's set this, and this is something that I know SEO tend to confuse.

Actually.

[30:32] There is something that SEO can support branding.

Oh, absolutely.

Support for sure.

[30:39] Is the part, the part there are two things.

One is the technical part.

[30:44] 'cause you know, structural data organization making understand to

machine that a brand is a brand.

[30:54] For instance was a case that a friend of mine told me there is a brand Spanish.

[31:00] Very important Spanish fashion brand of guise of Zara, but it's not Z.

[31:07] But have they have a problem with the knowledge graph?

[31:09] So they are recognized as a brand, as an entity in Spain, but in

Google US, they are not recognized.

[31:19] And they sound, they are saying like a name.

'cause it the brand name.

The brand name is a name and surname.

Google doesn't understand it.

[31:28] And this is because they didn't care too much about

structure data, knowledge graph.

[31:33] But then there is another thing that I started to do because I was lucky to

[31:39] have studied semiotics and all these things when I was in university It goes

[31:43] substantially against every, everything that has been said also by Googlers.

[31:49] So no, we are not using sentiment analysis, but doing sentiment analysis

[31:53] for SEO is great because in SEO people usually cluster keywords for topic.

So very need for clustering.

[32:03] But what I do is, okay, so let's try to see this query.

[32:07] And this is query find out is really interesting.

To use it.

[32:10] Let's cluster it for the sentiment implied by this query.

[32:15] So you can see urgency or some sort of emotion that is implied by the query.

So doing.

[32:23] And then I do a third type of clustering, which is analyzing what are the research

features that Google is presenting.

For this query.

[32:31] So usually for this type of query, we have the video pack, we have the image.

[32:36] Or for this way, people also ask, et cetera, et cetera.

[32:39] So I do okay, cluster this for topic, then cluster this for

[32:43] customer journey, the same queries for customer journey, and then for

format and emotion, so I can inform.

[32:51] I have one substantially, one architecture, but I can inform the

[32:54] nature of the content that should be filled in the architecture, filling

the architecture and doing so.

[33:02] I'm experimenting with a couple of clients.

[33:04] I started to work well because it's resonating 'cause I know that

[33:09] probably the click is not going to be so many as there were before.

[33:13] But I started to see random searches related to this kind

of content, treated this way.

[33:19] People resonates more to the people and so we are searching with the brand

and the keyword, so the branded search.

[33:27] And I also see somehow a correlation in visibility on Chat

GPT, Gemini and so on doing this.

[33:35] So it's not, it's really putting what you are saying.

The brand has these values.

[33:41] let's see if this value can resonate in the content.

[33:44] If the content and the sentiment of the customers or a potential

customer can con, coincident.

[33:50] And so instead of creating the classic guide with a classic 10 places

where everybody goes, let's try to.

[33:59] Find different way to, to present the same content.

[34:03] So be, I mean, it's a very, very old the Seth Godin, in the purple

or, I don't remember the color.

The color of the purple

A purple cow

you Yeah, it's especially, it's that.

It's poor classic marketing

Yeah.

and okay, so how you and.

[34:24] Because Sparktoro, we always know Rand Fishkin we know Amanda, but there is

[34:30] a third person who is a really good friend of mine too which is Casey Henry,

which is the guy in the backstage.

[34:37] So how you and Casey are using AI and introducing AI for your daily

work, but also for work in Sparktoro

Daily work?

[34:48] Not, not too much to be honest, but, uh, well, ca I should, I should clarify,

[34:56] Casey does use it for code review kinds of things to write some forms of code that

he thinks it's faster or better at, um.

[35:05] To do some debugging, but I very rarely use AI in my day-to-day work,

[35:12] which is mostly answering people's emails and you know, joining for

[35:17] podcasts like this, I do a lot of social media and content creation.

I do a lot of video filming.

[35:23] I do a lot of product development and ideation work

you know, talking to customers.

That kind of stuff.

[35:29] I don't, I don't find AI to be additive for me.

If it, if it is for you that's great.

[35:35] Inside of Spark Toro, however, we have found some clever use cases.

[35:39] We primarily use chat GPT and we use their API.

[35:43] We make calls against the API when depending on the kind of search that

[35:49] someone does, we will try and expand the data set that we have using.

[35:57] Essentially words that frequently come after other words, which

LLMs are great at doing, right?

[36:02] So we might say, for example, hey, you searched for let's say executives at

food and beverage companies in the UK.

[36:11] And we might go to Chat GPT and say, Hey, what are other titles and roles

[36:16] that we should be looking for that are essentially the same as, you

[36:20] know, executive manager or executive director of food and beverage brand.

[36:24] we'll go get those other ones and then we can add that into the query

[36:28] expansion so that when we look through our database of, you know, hundreds of

[36:31] millions of LinkedIn profiles, we can also include those profiles, which,

which substantially mean the same thing.

[36:38] So we're, we're doing stuff like that with it.

We find it useful.

[36:41] We have this new section coming soon called Take Action, which is

essentially us taking a bunch of.

[36:47] Prompts that we've seen our customers use with their audience research data.

[36:52] So a lot of people, yourself included, I think Gianluca, right?

[36:55] You'll export the CSV from Spark Toro, upload that to Chat GPT or Claude, and

[37:02] then you'll ask questions like, Hey, gimme a bunch of whatever content ideas

[37:07] that this audience would be likely to resonate with, or gimme some visuals

on social media that I could use.

[37:12] Gimme some ideas for videos that I might film of these podcasts that

[37:16] Spark Toro said which ones accept pitches for guests that, you know,

[37:20] it's that kind of thing that people are doing already with our data.

[37:23] And we, we thought, Hey, we should just take those prompts,

bake them into Spark Toro.

[37:28] And so you can go from a research report, click take action.

[37:31] Choose which task you wanna accomplish based on the audience research data.

[37:36] Connect the two right there and get the output inside Spark Toro.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's really cool.

[37:41] Because, it's a good way to maintain also, let's say, one project inside only one

[37:49] place because one of the problematic is that there are so many tools sometimes or

really pop into many tools in my, that.

Yes.

[37:59] When you, you have piece a bit of what you're doing and when you are obliged to

[38:06] do the classic merge into one gigantic CSV in Google workplace, and you know

[38:13] that Gemini is spying on you because it's activated on workspace and yes.

And.

[38:22] okay, so let's try to, to go are you experimenting with all the things that

[38:27] Google is trying people to experi, make, make, work make test with?

[38:32] Like, like the AI mode stuff and all that kind

Mm-hmm.

[38:37] No, I haven't played around with it much back in my SEO days,

[38:40] you know, I would've been, oh, I gotta spend a lot of time in here.

Now?

No, I don't, I don't have to bother.

[38:46] I, I do spend a lot of time, I mean, I spend a lot of time with other forms of

[38:51] audience research, so I look at a lot of like surveys and interviews, market

[38:53] research stuff, how other people are producing reports, talk to people about

their processes and that kind of thing.

[39:00] And in, I spend a lot of time in video games.

I play 15 minutes of like a lot of games.

Right.

And, and not a lot more, but.

Yeah.

[39:09] My research in SEO is basically non-existent these days.

[39:14] Well, well, I mean it, it's it, but anyway, because of what we have said

[39:20] before about using the search results as a zero click marketing space, if I was

you, I would test at least a web guide

Okay.

Yeah.

that is fine.

[39:33] It's, it's interesting because it's one is would be a good solution also for.

[39:39] For publisher because the links are, are there so people can

I saw, yeah, I saw some screenshots and

[39:45] And but it's also interesting because it's organized in a way that if you are asking

[39:50] for something, for instance, for ideas, for a travel, I test it with Washington

[39:55] because I'm going to go to spend my vacation in Washington DC So I test it.

[40:01] I said, what are the things that I can do with.

[40:04] During eight days with family, two teenagers, blah, blah, blah, and it's

[40:10] organizing it, it, it's cool the idea that I very find that it's substantially

[40:14] creating a pillar in with sub topics, let's say with our chapters with question

[40:21] and a series of link question and series of link and also text from ai.

[40:26] So, they are integrated well, so I hope that many people will try it.

That's also you and say, Hey, great.

Google Trash in the bin, AI overview.

Go for this.

[40:41] It's the good solution for everybody and, and I think it's a good

solution because nobody else has it.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's a, that's a good point too.

I am I'm surprised at the.

[40:54] Number of people who say they've switched away from using Google

toward AI tools entirely.

[41:00] That surprises me a lot because I can't find a way to substitute

[41:05] chat PT for my Google use or, or bing use or DuckDuckGo use.

[41:09] Like, it just, so much of what I do in those places is navigational.

[41:15] So much of it is like exploratory into other things.

[41:18] I, you know, if I ask chat GPT, like, Hey, I'm looking for a men's tuxedo shoe.

[41:23] I get a list of things and then I find out like, you know, the hallucination

[41:27] problem where Dolce and Gabbana doesn't actually make a brogue tuxedo shoe.

You know,

[41:32] going to give you a direction to a place where there is nothing, but I don't know.

yeah, right.

[41:38] Clicking on, you know, clicking on the Google image results or

the Google Shopping results.

It's just way, way better.

Right?

[41:44] And like, oh, I'm looking for flights to Tokyo.

Google flights is very helpful.

Chat GPT is still not great.

[41:51] Like it's not, it doesn't do the job, but regardless of that I think that

[41:55] the, I think that the era of zero click marketing, no matter what direction

[42:03] Google chooses, is here because, because of how people consume content.

[42:08] You know, we looked at, with clickstream data, Gianluca, we looked

[42:11] at essentially, you know, what people do with their day on the internet.

[42:16] Search is this much, you know, it's, it's less than 10% of all

[42:20] the visits that people make on the internet are to any form of search.

[42:24] I don't care if we're talking about AI tools or traditional search or whatever.

[42:27] What people spend a lot of time doing is, you know, browsing Reddit, watching

[42:31] YouTube videos, watching TikTok, um, four, four and a half, five hours

a day in the US of watching TikTok.

Right?

[42:38] It's, I think it's the same here in Europe.

[42:41] It's not, you know, that's not, influenceable through creating

content on your website.

No.

Yes.

[42:47] But I remember a study that you also described let's be honest, how

[42:54] when we use Chat I mean, we use it for creating image, creating image,

[43:02] asking question that Google will eventually answer with an answer box.

[43:08] So something that you have something which neither in the classic search

would bring a click and then.

[43:16] I think that most of the tasks when we did our analysis of chat, GBT prompts.

[43:21] Which was classifying may, maybe around a million prompts, right?

[43:25] Last year it was 70% plus generative tasks.

[43:31] Like, it was things you, you would never do and could not do with a search engine.

[43:35] So, you know, it'd be things, things like, Hey, will you help me write this email?

[43:40] Hey, will you brainstorm some ideas for this?

[43:42] Hey, will you whatever I'm having trouble with my.

Relationship with my daughter?

[43:48] Like, will you give me some ideas of conversations to have with her?

[43:52] I think almost 40%, maybe a little more than 40% of all ai prompts were something

[43:59] to do with programming that's not, you know, that's not a search, right?

I just, it's just not equivalent.

[44:06] like when, I mean, because it's conversational and it's easier

[44:10] for a person to conversate even if it's, it's a bot, but it's, it has

the tricky, but it has a voice.

[44:18] So it would be cool to see how many of these conversation

are made with a voice chat.

Because especially if you.

[44:25] A classic earth situation, like in the movie where you put the, if you are a

[44:31] guy, you put a, a cool voice of a, of a robot that sounds like an actress.

That maybe sounds like Scarlet Johansen.

[44:41] And, and it was happening in the very beginning of, of a voice chat of Titi.

[44:50] Yes, you start conversating, you forget, You're not conversating with a person.

So you can start asking things.

[44:58] And this is something that other friends of mine that were analyzing

this kind of behavior was saying.

[45:04] But yes, it's actually what you were saying, which is coming back to search.

[45:08] It's really how search behaviors change and.

[45:11] I always talk about the messy middle, because the messy middle is you have

[45:15] a trigger, and the trigger can be you working on the street as in something

[45:20] in, in the, in the shop, or can be you are in the shop and doing showrooming

[45:27] with Google lens, or maybe you are in Chat GPT in this case doing a

search, but then going to YouTube.

[45:38] 'cause it say, in this YouTube channel, and you go to YouTube and search

[45:41] for YouTube, and then YouTube, the YouTuber is recommending something.

[45:46] And so you click it though and go with a referral, click to a website and then go

to Google to see reviews about this tool.

[45:54] So that's why the, the search journey is really becoming so, and this was

[46:01] clear when we start seeing that the queries were getting longer, longer

and longer and longer over, over years.

[46:10] 'cause people started to learn how to search.

Before it was hotel Seattle.

Now I want a hotel in Seattle.

[46:19] Four star with breakfast included all this kind of stuff.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay?

So, woo, almost one hour.

I know.

[46:27] I was gonna say, I have to I have to run in a couple minutes here,

Yeah.

Yeah.

[46:30] So let, let's stop talking about marketing.

Let's start talking about you.

okay.

Tell, tell us more about this video game.

Sure.

[46:38] You so, so Snackbar, it's called the Snackbar at The End of The World.

That's the provisional working title.

We haven't formally announced the game.

[46:46] We haven't put up a trailer yet, any of those things.

[46:48] So the probably still at least 18 months to two years away.

[46:53] We'll most likely make an announcement about nine to

12 months before it launches.

And that's for marketing reasons.

Actually.

[47:01] If you study how games perform, they tend to lose their audience excitement

[47:07] if they haven't come out for more than a year after they've been announced.

[47:10] And we don't wanna lose any marketing excitement.

[47:12] So we wanna carefully time that the game is set in 1960s, Italy, sort of

a magical alternate reality version.

[47:22] And you play a chef in a small hilltop town on the, on the border between

[47:28] Umbria and Lazio and your running a restaurant with your brother, your

aunt who owned the restaurant has been.

[47:35] Thrown in prison and you're trying to make enough money to break her outta prison.

[47:40] And in order to do this, you need to go out into the dangerous, magical

[47:42] wilds around the town, and you fight boars and chicken and artichokes.

[47:48] Yes, even the artichokes will come attack you.

[47:50] And and you know, you need the artichokes to make Carciofi alla giudia

[47:54] or the, or the, you know, you need the pancetta or guanciale from the boar to

make your, Spaghetti alla carbonara.

[48:02] And so you find these recipes and traditional dishes you use the

ingredients that you get in the wilds.

[48:07] You make them, you make lira the old Italian currency, and then use the li.

[48:12] You can use the lira to upgrade your restaurant, upgrade your weapons in

[48:17] armor, go fight more, more dangerous monsters, and eventually, hopefully

break your aunt out of prison.

Cool, cool, cool.

[48:24] I mean, ah, this was, I mean, when you said it lira, my, my old

[48:30] memories were coming, coming back, and let's talk about memories.

[48:37] Usually the question is, what would you say to the younger yourself?

[48:43] Now the question is what you will never say to your younger yourself.

Oh my God.

[48:50] So I think about this sometimes when people say, you know, what would you,

what would you change from the past?

Or would you do differently?

[48:56] And there's this weird part of me, Gianluca, that reflects on the fact

that I have an extremely lucky life,

[49:05] like a almost exactly the life that I would want.

[49:10] That my, that my 12-year-old self would want.

[49:13] I, you know, I get to work on a video game.

[49:15] I have, I have other jobs, you know, Sparktoro and, and Alert Mouse,

[49:19] which, you know, hopefully make money and do well, they're enjoyable.

I get to work with people I like.

I have a wonderful marriage to Geraldine.

[49:28] I have so many wonderful friendships all over the world.

I get to travel and eat amazing things.

[49:35] I, I just feel incredibly blessed and lucky.

[49:39] And so part of me says I don't, I don't know that I would change too much.

[49:42] Like I went through painful things and I made terrible mistakes.

Really awful mistakes at Moz for sure.

But also, gosh, what?

[49:53] I don't know, what would, I wouldn't want to curse myself into a world where, for

[49:59] example, you know, let's say I hadn't made some of these bad mistakes at Moz.

Let's say Moz had become.

[50:05] An incredibly, you know, whatever, SEMrush, right?

[50:09] Instead of, instead of SEMrush going public, it was Moz that went public and

[50:12] I, I was the CEO and you know, we had, had this extraordinary thing and I became,

[50:17] I don't know, worth hundreds of millions or a billion dollars or something.

Have you, have you met people?

[50:23] I don't know how many people you know, who are like worth those numbers.

[50:28] I, I know almost none of them who are happy people.

[50:32] Or like happy contented, fulfilled in good marriages, in, you know,

[50:37] good situations with their, their families have close friendships.

[50:41] Like they have to become insular and protective, and they're always worried

about their security and their privacy.

And I don't worry about any of that stuff.

[50:50] You know, I live in a regular house to anyone, you know, like I, I, I

don't have to, I drive a regular car.

[50:57] I don't, I can go out in public, you know, it's.

It's great.

[51:02] Like I, I, I think, I think I'm not a complete asshole, and 99.9%

[51:09] of those people who are worth those numbers are just terrible.

[51:13] I don't know if that's correlation or causation, but

Maybe

grateful.

[51:18] usually there is a very, the consideration that, you know, people of that kind,

[51:26] but also super successful surgeons or super successful politician.

[51:31] Sometimes also they have a little bit of where, just a little

bit or more or less psychopath.

[51:42] But n no in the sense that, you know, psychopath is someone who has

a very low, if no sense of empathy,

Right, right,

[51:52] and for instance, being a little bit psychopathic for a surgeon is perfect.

It's it needed.

[51:57] Because if it was to empathic when it's in an urgency operation,

imagine it wouldn't be able to do

right.

I see.

Yeah.

[52:07] So, so also for, for instance, sometimes also in the.

Laws, policemen.

[52:13] The detectives sometimes have this kind of characteristic, but yes, I

[52:18] mean, I prefer to be more empathic than psychopathic, so I totally agree

[52:25] with what you say, the think that we visit, knowing that you have to go.

Thank you, Rand.

[52:30] It was a real pleasure to have you here and let's say, let's

[52:35] probably, I know that you're a busy, super requested man, but let's.

[52:40] One day in the future, let's do another episode with you.

[52:43] So to look back what we have said and do an update.

I, I love it.

Sounds great.

[52:49] Gianluca, thank you so much for having me Take care of yourself, my friend.

Thank you and thank you to everybody here.

Just let me do the creator stuff now.

Just one second.

[53:01] Remember to give it like to the video, subscribe to a channel,

so you're going to be notice.

Thank you and bye-bye.